WANT A TON OF NEW IDEAS for decorating/renovating your brownstone, loft, apartment or other urban dwelling?
Brownstoner.com, the colossal Brooklyn-based real estate website for which I write a long-running weekly design column called The Insider, has just created a “mini-site” aggregating all my past columns, from this morning back about five years, in one place.
Just go here, start clicking, and see all you may have missed.
PHILADELPHIA WAS A POIGNANT PLACE to spend time in the immediate aftermath of the election (after casting my vote in NYC, of course).
Everywhere you look, there are statues and portraits of presidents and patriots, reminders of genius, courage and high-flying ideals. As you walk the very streets and pass the very buildings where our country was founded, you have to wonder where our new President-elect fits into the picture. At what point, exactly, did the Roman Empire begin to fall, and are we there yet?
Certainly there were internecine battles as vicious as the recent campaign in the run-up to the Revolution, and after. The Civil War was far more horrific than our recent electoral War Between the States, and we survived that.
So I have to say that, yes, the perspective gained by walking Philadelphia’s über-historic, über-charming streets (and Uber-ing through them as well, as a matter of fact) helped to quell the panic.
I had a visitor from Brooklyn, a friend who couldn’t bear to spend the first few days of the new reality alone. We steeped ourselves in great art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the country’s first art museum; visited the new Barnes Foundation and were moved by its monumental modern architecture and landscaping, overwhelmed by the sheer number of masterpieces; took an impromptu tour of the 18th century Powel House in Society Hill, a fine and under-visited house museum; checked out the Italian Market and the Maxfield Parrish-designed, L.C. Tiffany-executed stained glass mural at the Curtis Publishing building in Washington Square; and ate and drank at any number of restaurants and watering holes.
They say you can get used to anything, and indeed the initial shock has begun to taper off. But last week in Philly, we were tourists in a strange land. There was something especially surreal about that first post-apocalypse day, when people in blue Philadelphia’s cafés and cobbled streets exchanged rueful glances and sad smiles, the rain fell, and it seemed the world wept.
Below, the high Victorian splendor of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, founded in 1876, filled with all-American art.
Architects Frank Furness and George Hewitt pulled out all the stops.
There are modern works too, including some great examples of the Ashcan School, O’Keefe, Hopper, Feininger et al.
We checked out a temporary exhibition, on through January, of Thomas Eakins’ provocative, mostly nude photographs, an early exploration of the new medium, below. Eakins, a Philadelphia painter, taught at PAFA, then and now also an art school, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (And we hippies thought we invented skinny-dipping.)
The powerful architecture and landscaping around the new Barnes Foundation building, below, off Benjamin Franklin Parkway (Philly’s Museum Mile), make it difficult to take a bad picture.
Photography is not allowed inside the museum, which represents one man’s collection of masterpieces (180+ Renoirs, Cezannes by the dozen, Matisses galore, Rousseaus, Modiglianis, Picassos, plus ancient Greek pottery, Navajo silver, other metalwork and furniture), all mounted for exhibit in rooms that recreate exactly the suburban home of Albert Barnes in precisely the arrangement he left at his death in 1951.
Below, houses that caught my eye, mostly in Washington Square West and Society Hill.
Here’s one that invites you in, as did the site manager at the 1765 Powel House, below, when we approached her at the door to inquire what time the next tour was. “I guess there could be one right now,” she said.
The ballroom, above. Washington danced here.
Jennifer Davidson, our lovely guide to the Powel House.
Below, one of Philadelphia’s best-kept decorative arts secrets: the glowing Maxfield Parrish/L.C. Tiffany stained glass mural, some 40 or 50 feet across, in the lobby of the Curtis Publishing building at the northeast corner of Washington Square. Called “The Dream Garden,” it was created in 1914-15 and is free for the viewing.
Some flavorful neighborhood scenes: a South Street cigar shop…
my go-to cafe, the Hungry Pigeon, in quiet Queen Village…
the nearby Italian Market, the likes of whose permanent outdoor stalls I haven’t seen in any other city…
a Polish restaurant in Port Richmond in north Philadelphia, a spot I have been known to hit on my way out of town for the cheese and potato pierogies with fried onions and sour cream, below. (Well, come on, after all that walking?!)
Here are just two of the literally thousands of building-size murals in Philly, a result of its unique Mural Arts Program, both offering glimpses into fantastical worlds: top, Center City; bottom, Bella Vista.
“Today I pray for…” says the blackboard outside Old St. Joseph’s Church in Society Hill, a tin pail of chalk at the ready.
I ALWAYS LOVED those hokey “Then & Now” books you could buy at souvenir kiosks in Rome, showing what the Forum and Colosseum looked like in their 1st century heyday, with acetate pages superimposed to show how they look today.
The photo above, courtesy Brooklyn Historical Society, was taken at the intersection of Fourth and Flatbush Avenues in the late 1920s. Despite the traffic chaos, you can make out the bottom of the then-new Williamsburg Savings Bank tower behind the elevated train tracks and the row of commercial buildings at left, which are still there — see below if you don’t believe me — but who knows for how long.
Recently, a new branch of TD Bank opened on Atlantic Avenue in Boerum Hill. It’s decorated with murals depicting early 20th c. neighborhood scenes. They were even giving away placemat-sized posters of the same images, which I was happy to take.
I then went and stood at each vantage point to see what remained — probably less than remains in Rome after two millennia. You can make out a few of the same buildings, but the charm has all been lost to the relentless march of commerce.
Above, looking west on Atlantic Avenue from Court Street, c. 1930. Below, same view today. The street light remains (or a replica), and quite a few of the row houses. I’m sure developers are itching to get their hands on all that open sky.
Below, a c.1922 image (note horse cart and earlier cars), northwest corner of State and Court Streets.
Two decades ago, the monstrosity below, in the form of a multiplex cinema and mega-bookstore was visited upon us. Thanks to historic district protection, the row houses on State Street, barely visible behind the trees, remain.
Below, my fave, the northeast and southeast corners of State and Court, looking up toward the Williamsburg Savings Bank clock tower, c. 1929, when the tower had just been built.
I moved to the area in 1979, and that corner looks very familiar. It’s only in the last decade or so that the undistinguished brick boxes, below, that replaced the vintage buildings came to be. You can just about see the clock tower down at the end of the block.
As Brian Wilson sang, I just wasn’t made for these times. If Mr. Peabody’s wayback machine comes along to take me back 80 or so years, I’m on it.
LIVING A SIX-MINUTE WALK from a west-facing bay beach on the East End of Long Island, N.Y., I’ve become something of a professional sunset chaser, often with wine glass in hand.
The sunsets here are particularly gratifying. I’ve learned you can’t tell beforehand how spectacular a sunset will be, and that the colors only grow more vivid after the sun dips below the horizon, reaching peak saturation about 20 minutes later, and then beginning to fade.
Since last May, I’ve missed very few sunsets, from the fair-to-middling to the wowie-kazowie. Here, a few of the latter.
May 15
June 10
June 15
June 16
July 10
July 26
August 26
September 2
September 11 (Montauk)
September 20 & 21
CONSIDER THE LILIES of the field, and let’s not forget the hydrangeas, ladies’ mantel, astilbe, verbena and other things… July here at Green Half-Acre is turning out OK after all.
Lilies — whether fancy ones from a catalogue, yard sale buckets of roadside orange day lilies, hybrids passed on by a friend, bulbs picked up last summer at the Long Island Daylily Society show and sale in Farmingdale — all seem to do well here, and they’re so EASY. More lilies, I say!
Above: Showstoppers alongside my front walk (Netty’s Pride, and mine too.)
The purple things are verbena bonariensis, said to be a self-seeding annual, and I hope it is in years to come. That backdrop of greenery is sweet-smelling native bayberry, which was here on my arrival three-plus years ago.
Your classic Hamptons blue hydrangea. True, I don’t have many such, but even a few are spectacular.
More rhodies! These a later-blooming native type, of which I have inherited some two major stands. I missed seeing them last July and the one before (when the house was rented) and am thoroughly enjoying them now.
The long-blooming yellow ladies’ mantel in the foreground is a treat; I’ve tried it before, elsewhere, without success. Here it’s become a standout.
In the wooded part of the property, still largely ‘undeveloped,’ a profusion of white hydrangea blossoms from a bush bought for $5 from a local couple who have a nursery of sorts in their modest backyard.
I am pleased with my scallop shell mulch on one side of the front walk. The shells are available at the local recycling center, i.e. dump, where some commercial fishing operation evidently dumped them for the taking. The grasses are chasmanthium (sea oats) and, if I remember correctly, Prairie Fire grass that isn’t getting enough sun to turn red.
Things to come: Turk’s cap lily buds in abundance.
casaCARA 